REWIND: Sadly not that Patrick Duffy...

REWIND: Sadly not that Patrick Duffy...

ONE of Britain’s most famous sitcom stars was in Swindon and Wroughton this week in 1977.

Tony Selby was a national celebrity thanks to his role in National Service comedy Get Some In! as a sadistic RAF NCO, Corporal Marsh.

The programme, which ran from 1975 to 1978, helped to launch the careers of future stars Robert Lindsay and Karl Howman, and respected Scottish actor Brian Pettifer, who all played recruits.

Tony Selby was appearing at the Wyvern Theatre in a play called My Three Angels, a comedy about prisoners in a French colony.

We photographed the actor next to a poster of himself outside the theatre, and also on a bed at Princess Alexandra’s Royal Air Force Hospital in Wroughton, surrounded by nurses and other personnel.

Thanks to being so peppered with swearing as to be all but unrepeatable, Get Some In! has acquired near-mythical status among connoisseurs of vintage British television.

Another programme with near-mythical status, albeit for very different reasons, is Children of the Stones, which is generally thought of as one of the greatest children’s dramas ever made.

The cult series, about two young people who come to live in a village where time is altered by the presence of an ancient stone formation, was in the midst of its first run.

It had been filmed the previous summer in Avebury, and starred Katherine Levy, Gareth Thomas and Peter Demin.

We ran an interview with Katherine, who was 15 at the time and would later go on to appear in 1980s hit Robin of Sherwood before becoming a producer.

She recalled her introduction to showbusiness: “I joined a drama group and enjoyed it. What I didn’t know was that the principal was also an agent, and that she’d sent my picture to the BBC.” Her first television role was in a BBC production of David Copperfield, and she had also taken a role in classic historical drama I, Claudius.

Tony Selby was not the only VIP visitor to Wroughton. Patrick Duffy also paid a call.

Unfortunately, the Patrick Duffy in question was not the American actor who was at that time The Man from Atlantis and would soon be Bobby Ewing in Dallas.

“The death knell for Wroughton’s Royal Naval Aircraft Yard was sounded dismally and finally today by Navy Minister Patrick Duffy,” we said.

“Emerging from nearly two hours of talks with union leaders at the station, he said plans for the closure in two years would go ahead.”

The yard repaired and maintained naval aircraft, but was deemed surplus to requirements.

Mr Duffy said of his meeting: “I had to tell them, though, with regret because I know what it means to them in terms of jobs and happiness.”

He added that the survival of the base, which had 250 civilian workers, was totally out of the question.

In happier economic news, Swindon-based tableware firm Clover Leaf was one of many exhibitors from across the country at the International Spring Fair in Birmingham.

The Queen Mother made an official visit to the fair and Clover Leaf joint managing director Raymond White was presented.

At the time it was generally accepted that there was barely a household in the UK which did not have at least one set of Clover Leaf table mats, piece of crockery or coaster.

The company had a manufacturing base in Swindon until the announcement in 2002 that it had been bought out by a County Durham firm, and that its Groundwell factory was to close.

An unusual wedding also made our newslist that week 41 years ago.

In early 1977, punk was a major emerging youth movement, generating sensationalist headlines and prompting an assortment of learned talking heads to lament what they saw as the disastrous decline of civilisation.

A decade earlier, a previous generation of talking heads - and some of those still around in 1977 - had said the same thing about hippies, but a decade before that, in the late 1950s, had come the original moral panic about young people supposedly gone wild, disrespecting their elders and sneering at societal norms.

That youth movement was the Teddy Boys or Teds, famed for quiffs, Edwardian-style suits which gave them their nickname, crepe-soled shoes and a fondness for the dangerous new rock’n’roll music.

By the late 1970s the movement was smaller but still had its devotees. Some embraced the style while others simply liked the music.

Among them were Swindon couple Kenny Shepherd and Margaret Brind, whose wedding at the Register Office was attended by 26 guests, many of them in full vintage regalia.

The wedding party then strolled through town to the Stage bar in Theatre Square for their reception.

The DJ was Tony Vernon, known to generations of vintage rock’n’roll enthusiasts as Swindon’s original Teddy Boy.

Ipsoregulated

This website and associated newspapers adhere to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice. If you have a complaint about the editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then please contact the editor here. If you are dissatisfied with the response provided you can contact IPSO here